ATI Radeon HD 5450 & HD 5570 Graphics Cards

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February 8, 2010 by Lawrence Lee

Product	ATI Radeon HD 5450 512MB PCI-E Graphics Card	ATI Radeon HD 5570 1GB PCI-E Graphics Card
Manufacturer	ATI/AMD
Street Price	US$45~$55	US$79~$85 (SEP)

The HD 5850, 5870, and 5970 made big splashes when they were released last year, but they are all high-end cards costing $300+. Some users cannot afford or are unwilling to invest that much money in a graphics card; many still simply don't need that much horsepower. For casual gamers, a card like the 5570 offers reasonable performance at a reasonable price. The 5450 appeals to those who do little or no PC gaming, but enjoy watching a lot of high definition video.

Radeon HD 5450 (top) and HD 5570 (bottom).

One feature that has been marketed heavily by ATI is the Eyefinity multi-display technology. While Eyefinity is supported on all HD 5000 series cards, both of our reference samples lack the native DisplayPort connector required for Eyefinity. That's not to say the 5450 and 5570 do not support Eyefinity; ATI's board partners have the option to include a DisplayPort if they wish, so you will see retail versions both with and without.

HD 5450 technical specifications according to GPU-Z.

The 5450 takes the lowest position in ATI's 40nm family; as the runt of the litter, it should be very power efficient and provide a sizable improvement in 3D performance over integrated graphics. Still, it likely lacks any serious gaming prowess and may be suitable only for those who enjoy older titles or play at low resolutions. It does however make an ideal high definition playback card as it has the ability to bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. This feature is available on the entire HD 5000 line, but now you don't have to spend $100+ for it.

HD 5570 technical specifications according to GPU-Z.

The 5570 is one step up from the 5450, presumably the minimum any serious gamer should consider. Though it costs only $30 more, the 5570 packs a lot more under the hood including over twice the number of transistors, 5 times as many stream processors, higher texture/pixel fillrates, and more memory bandwidth. All this comes with a considerably higher power rating as well, which is why our reference sample has an active cooler. Its closest competitor from the previous generation is the HD 4670.

Specifications
Card	Radeon HD 5450	Radeon HD 5570
Process	40nm	40nm
Transistors	292M	627M
Engine Clock	650 MHz	650 MHz
Stream Processors	80	400
Compute Performance	104 GFLOPS	520 GFLOPS
Texture Units	8	20
Texture Fillrate	5.2 GTexels/s	13 GTexels/s
ROPs	4	8
Pixel Fillrate	2.6 Gpixel/s	5.2 Gpixel/s
Z/Stencil	10.43 GSamples/s	20.8 GSamples/s
Memory Type	DDR3 / DDR2	DDR3
Memory Clock	Up to 800 MHz	900 MHz
Memory Data Rate	Up to 1.8 Gbps	1.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	Up to 12.8 GB/s	28.8 GB/s
Typical Board Power	19.1W	42.7W
Idle Board Power	6.4W	9.69W

It should be noted that our 5450 sample actually does not conform to the specifications listed by ATI as its memory is clocked at 900MHz. Expect slightly lower power consumption and 3D performance on models that adhere to the reference specifications.

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